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An anonymous reader writes "According to a report dated 2010 recently provided by [former NSA contractor Edward] Snowden to the German news magazine 'Der Spiegel', the NSA has systematically been spying on institutions of the EU in Washington DC, New York, and Brussels. Methods of spying include bugging, phone taps, and network intrusions and surveillance according to the documents."All part of a grand tradition.

Your slavish devotion to the United States government has been duly noted.

For your obedient behavior, you have been awarded one (1) hour of vacation from your wage slavery, to be taken at any time during the next year. It is suggested, if you wish to earn further such credits, that you use this hour to engage in government-approved speech or other nonsubversive activities.

So you think that countries like Germany, Denmark, or, say, Luxembourg are all massively tapping into US telecomunications infrastructure in order to extract information about US companies, read private mails of US politicians, and build a large-scale database of all communications of US citizens? Or that they tap into the networks of the United States Congress?

Clearly you fail to grasp what is really happening. This is another example of the tail wagging the dog. All the corporate contractors providing services for the CIA/NSA have turned around and taken over those government bodies and are now actively involved in corporate espionage, for private for profit advantage.
Rampant corruption of those bodies by the military industrial complex, for the benefit of the corporations. Whether it be massive data gathering for extortion of public and elected officials and their families or the silencing of all opposition throw exposure and intimidation.

You are basically seeing the activity of psychopaths who should be in prison, attempting to gain total control by creating a digital panopticon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon [wikipedia.org], via all device connected to the internet.

As opposed to the USA where you can be *legally* stopped and searched for no reason at all within 100km of the border.... a large % of the US population lives within 100km of a border.

What we found is that fully TWO-THIRDS of the United States’ population lives within this Constitution-free or Constitution-lite Zone. That’s 197.4 million people who live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders.Nine of the top 10 largest metropolitan areas as determined by the 2000 census, fall within the Constitution-free Zone.

You should use mod points where they will make a difference. Find trolls or spam, mod them down. Find that insightful comment that is still sitting at zero and give it a point. That's what mod points are for, not throwing them away because you agree with a bunch of folks that did something else first.

Oh, there can be no doubt that NSA spies on the Russians. So, on the other hand Snowden seems to consider Russia a legitimate target, and does not reveal anything about NSA activity over there. Then he goes to Russia on his own and ends up being questioned by Russian officials.

I don't think going to Russia was ever in his long term plan. He was clearly hoping Hong Kong would not extradite him. At some point he changed his mind about that. Russia was likely just part of some short term strategy to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison for doing a good deed. At this point however he may have no choice but to apply for political asylum in Mother Russia. It may not be a Libertarian Utopia. Certainly no more than the US. But it's a hell of a lot better than a US prison or gas chamber. Even North Korea would be better than that.

I probably would have flown to Laos. Not as modern as Hong Kong, but no extradition treaty with the US. It's cheap, and the people are some of the nicest in the world. It might be considered Communist, but it feels freer than the US because no one really bothers you. On paper you're not at all free, but in practice you are often more free than in the US. But I guess Russia isn't so bad.

First, we kind of expect the US to behave better than China, otherwise this fuss would not have happened.Secondly, no, HK is not China, little more than it was previously England.Among other things, Hong Kong has its own hard currency, laws, passports, government, judicial independence, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.These freedoms are not merely theoretical, but frequently exercised in a way that may indeed have people sent off for reeducation if done in mainland China.

Beijing may well have forced HK to warn Snowden out, but that's better than the pressure that would have come from Washington on many other countries.

If we don't spy on everyone, the terrorists will get us (and maybe the communists, but they're not the big bad bogeymen they once were)! Grope everyone at airports! Have secret courts rubberstamp warrants that allow for the collection of random people's information even though there's no probable cause! Spy on allies! Spy on every single person in existence!

Somehow it seems as if our own politicians hate our freedom more than the terrorists supposedly do...

They have to spy on everybody, because anybody could be, or become, a terrorist, either willingly or unwillingly.

The only people that can be trusted are obviously only a small group of people close to the President, and a handful of Congressmen and Senators.

Yes I think there are around 400 to 500 of them which collectively own and control our system. They can be trusted because of their mass wealth and the fact that any thing they want whether legal or not will be given to them. They have no reason to get involved with messy religious martyrdom products practiced by poor ignorant brown people. I mean after all they select few have no souls to begin with so why bother with anything other than money an power. If they gamble their money away the government will always cover the lost since they are to-big-to-fail and it was really the consumers fault somehow anyway,

Welcome to our brave new world, It only gets worse from here on out. Start stashing water and food some place safe for when the riots start. There is no way to know when but I'd say with-in the next 10 years the US will be coming apart at its seams... People are perfectly happy to watch TV and ignore everything until they are starving from lack of affordable food and massive inflation in each and every sector of our economy. When people start going hungry (I think congress just failed to pass the farm bill for the first time in 40 years). That's the food stamps program among other thing.. Yeah people get really pissed off really fast when they can't have their Mt Dew and Cheeto's. Doesn't mater if the SNAP program is right or wrong when you are being mugged at knife point so someone can by some Raymons,,, These poor people might be leaching of the rest of us but putting them in jail costs more and they aren't going to suffer like some here would love to see. No they will attack and it will be random and bloody. Think about that the next time you are talking with your friends about cutting mental health and food/medical assistance from the poor. You are being short sighted and you and your family with pay, one way or another...

Yes I think there are around 400 to 500 of them which collectively own and control our system. They can be trusted because of their mass wealth and the fact that any thing they want whether legal or not will be given to them. They have no reason to get involved with messy religious martyrdom products practiced by poor ignorant brown people. I mean after all they select few have no souls to begin with so why bother with anything other than money an power. If they gamble their money away the government will always cover the lost since they are to-big-to-fail and it was really the consumers fault somehow anyway,

I don't get why people think that tremendous wealth is a key to power. Power can always just take wealth or sell its exclusive services for a high price. But in contrast, the kind of power the NSA exercises here can't be created with just wealth.

As to your complaint about food stamps and such, remember the saying that "a government powerful enough to give you everything you need, is also powerful enough to take away everything you have." All these little services are power - both because of the transfer of wealth (which among other things can be partly diverted for projects such as SNAP) and because creation of a public good inevitably leads to regulation of consumption of that public good to avoid tragedy of commons issues. Consider for that last point, the necessity of collecting information about the potential consumers of the good (who has your mental health data for your mental health care?), enforcement of law (just about every bureau and department has some sort of law enforcement group), and the need to regulate related human behavior (selling food stamps for cash).

Your post is a great example of how people can complain about government abuses of power and yet at the same time advocate giving that government power to abuse. It's all the same government. Why can you trust it with food stamps or mental health care when you can't trust it not to nose around in your affairs or with military matters?

You are being short sighted and you and your family with pay, one way or another...

I'd rather my family pay for their own services rather than my family pay with a loss of freedom. With freedom comes risk. I think that's a great tradeoff.

I'm afraid it really is a guarantee of power. It's certainly not absolute, but being able to afford lawyers, or to invest in politically sensitive causes, or even to pay taxes, all grant some level of power.

Ok, I think you're right here. I guess my opinion here is that it looked to me like the poster I was replying to thought that was the prime ingredient. And well, I just don't think wealth by itself is that big a deal. For example, two of the best historical examples of power via wealth are Crassus (who among other things was a key player in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire) and Richard Neville (16th Earl of Warwick). Each was able to parlay their wealth into considerable politi

I think it's wrong to say a religion allows or prohibits anything. A religion is defined by its followers, and can change greatly between regions or historical periods. The best you can really state is that there are some things in a religion which the vast majority of followers will agree upon at this time.

To give a concrete example, a few centuries ago Christianity prohibited lending money*. This wasn't a contriversial thing: Ask any priest, or any layperson with a passing familiarity with the subject, an

Aren't those precisely the people we SHOULD be monitoring? I mean, they are in public office. We scrutinize every single other piece of their vein lives, why not their office-life? Oh, that's right, because it'll expose the broken system of supposed Democracy(TM) we think we have. They'll just find a myriad of underhanded deals, office-politics, lies, lobbying favors and all sorts of things we would not like. And that's assuming the NSA would divulge that information instead of using it in their own little government power-plays.

The entire point of having an agency like the NSA is to spy on people. If you aren't going to spy on people why in hell would you have this kind of agency? It makes no sense to get mad about the NSA spying since that is their entire reason for existence. I mean really, you hire a bunch of spies and then what? They spy on people, that's what. Jeeez!

The cheapest way to get security is to not piss people off, if you don't have enemies then security is very easy.

So, I'm curious - what do you think we did to piss the Japanese off in 1941?

Or the Germans, for that matter?

Do keep in mind that they declared war on us, not the other way around?

Are you for real? in 1941 you froze Japanese assets in the US and put an embargo on US oil exports to Japan - when Japan was completely reliant on US oil (> 80% of their consumption).

You also used the US navy to escort your allies' (who were engaged in war with Germany) convoys that were carrying war materials to Great Britain and the USSR with explicit orders to treat any German ships as hostile. This lead to skirmishes with German U-boats and to German merchant ships being seized by the US navy - all the while you were still pretending not to be at war with Germany.

The reasons for these acts were attacks against your allies (Japanese occupation of French Indochina, German threat to Britain), no threat to the US itself. It's of course nice if you want to help out your allies but helping out your allies in their wars while pretending to be a neutral party in said wars does simply not work out. I don't see how you can in that situation complain that they made a war official that you had already been waging for several months.

It would be just as absurd as today's US complaining about a declaration of war by Iran, labeling them as the aggressor while ignoring any economic sanctions, assassinations of nuclear scientists, stuxnet,...

By that logic, we should all just line up to get our appendixes taken out.

Do you know about the paradox of false positives? Let's say there are 300 hard core terrorists in the US planning to bomb something. If the NSA were able to determine a terrorist from a non-terrorist 99% of the time (and they're not. it's more like 60% of the time), that means you'd have hundreds of thousands of people declared terrorists who are not. So instead of bei

Not really. In a sense every North Korean citizen is a spy for their thought police, reporting even their nuclear family for any perceived deviation from the required norms on pain of death. Those reported to be unfaithful suffer three generations of punishment: they, their brothers and cousins go to the camp with whatever progeny they have and suffer three generations of punishment where the third generation is guaranteed not to survive. AFAIK that's as large a spying instance as you can get. That's the spying limit.

Also yesterday there was this ex-NSA guy accusing seven EU countries of having secret deals with the US to share communications data. (confirming long held suspicions and subject of one interview last week with a member of the Dutch secret service which was hastily denied by the responsible minister)

Germany 'among countries offering intelligence' according to new claims by former US defence analyst

At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain have been colluding with the US over the mass harvesting of personal communications data,
according to a former contractor to America's National Security Agency, who said the public should not be "kept in the dark".

Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the
agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.

Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third party status" under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand
over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.

Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US
is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.

In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog, Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on espionage issues,
said he had decided to speak out after becoming concerned about the "half story" told by EU politicians regarding the extent of the NSA's
activities in Europe.

He said that under the agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the "NSA gets the lion's share" of the sigint
"take". In return, the third parties to the NSA agreements received "highly sanitised intelligence".

Madsen said he was alarmed at the "sanctimonious outcry" of political leaders who were "feigning shock" about the spying operations
while staying silent about their own arrangements with the US, and was particularly concerned that senior German politicians had accused the UK of spying
when their country had a similar third-party deal with the NSA.

Although the level of co-operation provided by other European countries to the NSA is not on the same scale as that provided by the UK, the allegations are
potentially embarrassing.

"I can't understand how Angela Merkel can keep a straight face, demanding assurances from [Barack] Obama and the UK while Germany has entered into
those exact relationships," Madsen said.

The Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford, a senior member of the European parliament's civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee, said
Madsen's allegations confirmed that the entire system for monitoring data intercept

If you want to understand why the article was pulled, I suggest googling the source it quotes.

Wayne Madsen has a long history of being, shall we say, "slightly creative". He's a fully signed up 9/11 conspiracy theorist, birther and ardent believer that Obama is gay. Oh, he also believes that the 2009 swine flu outbreak was a US bioweapons test.

Now, that's not to say that everything he says is automatically wrong. But if you want to look at some of the things he has claimed as absolute truth in the past, then if he were to be right here, it would be on the "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" basis.

For the Guardian to run a major story based on him as its only source is an absolutely shocking lapse in journalistic standards.

Thanks for the background information. It certainly makes the "Madsen is a loon" theory more likely. That or the "Madsen is a loon who is being fed damaging misinformation by his NSA buddies to divide the EU against itself" theory. His information does line up with other pieces of information that have come out, but then Madsen has access to newspapers as well.

The weird thing is that when I read the story yesterday it didn't seem all that major to me . Another in a long line of leaks that has surrounded the whole Snowden thing. Now because the story has been pulled (not before the Observer had taken over the story and printed it on the front page) it's turning into a major paranoid shitstorm.

Now that the Obama administration's previous talking points about the spying being very limited, tightly controlled and focused on finding terrorists and those bent on harming the US and its allies -- we found that part of the program is in fact, to spy on our allies? To spy on the EU -- which is essentially an NGO -- is certainly more in line with spying for economic and political interests rather than defensive purposes.

I wonder what poor sap at the White House press room will have to figure out a way

Actually, countries likely have a mutual spying agreement. USA spies on $COUNTRY, $COUNTRY spies on USA, and they share information. Both never technically spy on their own citizens and therefore obey their own constraints, yet they effectively have full unchecked information invasion on their own people.

The US was spying on the UK but wasn't handing all the data over, but giving it to US companies to get better deals.

Yeah, the CIA did this (are still doing this?) to a bunch of Aussie companies as well - used CIA/ASIO information sharing to let US companies know what Aussie wheat prices were going to be so that the US could undercut the Aussies in key markets, etc.

Our government is a bit like a sociopath. We are nobody's friend. Everyone is merely a potential enemy. We spy on everyone. No exceptions. I'm sure we even spy on the UK and Canada as utterly pointless as that may be. If we ever ended up at war with either Canada or the UK then we'd almost certainly be better off losing anyway.

Of course, from Washington's POV the problem is not so much that we spy even on our friends, but that someone blabbed about it. They won't think about changing their behavior toward our allies. About acting honorably at least toward our allies. Rather they will think more about how badly they can punish the leaker. I can only imagine how badly they are itching to get Snowden's ass to gitmo and torture him to death in very creative ways.

Except for the fact that, *by treaty* The US, UK, NZ Canada and Australia are allegedly sharing all intelligence each of their respective agencies gather. Originally; the intent was to let each nation focus its spending and efforts on just one region that it already had a substantial interest in while still benefitting from a dliligent approach in all the other regions. Explicit in this was a reciprocity. The American NSA, with all its well known and not so well known programs, harvests vast amounts of data on say, UK citizens, perfectly within it's purview of external intelligence, meanwhile MI6 shares all the data it has collected on US citizens.

A lot of people; including myself, have been very vocal about their concerns at the scope of data being collected by the various three letter agencies of the US government. Many people in power get reassured by statements along the lines of "we never keep any data on our own citizens unless there is a link to a person of interest". What gets overlooked is that the US doesn't *have* to keep data on all it's citizens, all they have to do is pass along all the raw data they collect, in keeping with the treaty, and then just ask the partner nations for the digested and analyzed results. (and they of course do the same in return)

It is the top secret version of the "business in the Cloud" problem. The organization WILL collect everything it possibly can, data mine and analyze as they see fit, they will just keep the actual data stores in servers located and operated offshore by "affiliates". Some court rules the organization cannot collect or keep such data? No problem, our affiliate will do that for us offshore and dodge those pesky laws.

The difference here is, the organizations are not in it for profit (though funding is always a motive) they are in it because they genuinely believe it is their duty to do so. Think of it this way; you are a bodyguard, your livelihood depends on the client staying healthy, you love the client and want them to stay healthy as well. Yet the client has made a bunch of rules tohis/her own taste. The upshot is that you can only stand on the left side and can only be within arms reach durign daylight. If you take your job seriously, you would be very motivated to team up with another clients bodyguard so as to cover those gaps in the protection you provide. Your client never said anything about having the _other_ bodyguard in the bedroom at night after all, just you.
All intelligence agencies have that problem. Being a good weasel makes you good at your job of collecting intel, but the better weasel you are, the easier and more likely it is that you end up no longer truely serving the people you are trying to protect.

If there is one thing history AND/OR current events can teach us, it's that it is a HELL of a lot easier and safer to do ones job well rather than ones duty well.

Actually, I think it's a good thing we're keeping tabs, because allegiances do change. Better to keep our guard up rather than let it down. This is what we pay them for. We're allies, working towards common goals, but NOT the same nation, and we'd damn sure want to keep these intelligence channels open in case something that's unthinkable now comes around tomorrow.

I think the rest of the world is intelligent enough to realize that there is a difference between the US government (which indeed appears to everybody else as a sociopathic rabid bully and war mongerer) and the people living in the USA, which are mostly just the same as everybody else on the globe, wanting to make a living, fall in love, raise their children and have a good time.

We may make a difference between government and distinct individuals, but in the end, the only thing that can stop a government is its own people. As long as the citizens of the States of the Union continue to tolerate unlimited corruption in name of "campaign contributions", broken election methods for representatives, and as long as this corruption leads them to elect a leadership with the same behaviour, the rest of the world can only conclude that the people of the USA wants it.

It is a bit strange. The diplomatic cables leak was embarrassing but mostly damaged dictators overseas. It actually showed the US as pretty reasonable behind the scenes. Of course Manning should be punished, he clearly betrayed the trust put in him, but the incredible level of torture he was put through completely contradicted the Obama aim to close Guantamo Bay as a show of a return to human rights. Then chasing a journalist like Julian Assange including leaning on the Swedish and UK governments? Ridiculously over the top. The US is just painting itself out to be a global bully, trampling on the rights of its allies. If they kill somebody in the Middle East we just skip past that page in the newspaper but their actions clearly show it could be *you* next that gets "extraordinary rendition" if you accidentally upset them. A bit worrying.

The same thing with Snowden. Here the leaker may actually have a point, if he genuinely believed he was revealing systematic breaking of the law by officials put in place to protect them. In the UK we've known about the US slurping up all our communication for decades. We know we are getting a pretty raw deal, with 'sanitised' intelligence scraps being thrown to us when the US feel like it. They just have to keep silent on this debate and it will be forgotten in a couple of weeks. All they have to do is say "Snowden broke law X, and if he returns to the US he will be arrested". Leave it at that! A witch hunt shows a level of immaturity other governments do not want to see from a nation with the sigint and military might the US has.

Or at least don't visit the US. Don't try to make friends with a sociopath or a government that is indistinguishable from one.

Are we like one of those guys who enters a school with a machine guns and grenades? The students might smile at you, but really they just want to get away from you. I used to think we were the good guys. [youtube.com]

There's another option. Accept the fact that you will never be truly safe, and live with the possibility that any moment could be your last from a terrible accident or crime. While you are alive, however, live your life as freely as possible, harming and infringing on the rights of others as little as you can while still participating in a modern, thriving, society.

I'd rather a 9/11 size attack happen every generation than suffer through the insults to my dignity and liberty required to prevent it--and in reality you'll never be able to prevent them all anyway. Might as well be free and unsafe, than enslaved and still unsafe.

When Google Microsoft and Facebook deny they gave *direct* access to the NSA, they were telling the truth. They gave direct access to the *FBI* who gave direct access to the NSA! See! Not a lie!

That's not what Google said. Google said [blogspot.com] "First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers."

Note that the statement was not limited to NSA spying.

That WP graphic you linked isn't inconsistent with Google's statements, though. The graphic implies, but does not state, that the data for the "tasking" is automatically extracted and returned to the FBI without any involvement by the company. If instead you assume that the tasking merely results in the delivery of a properly-formatted request to the company, then it fits. Google's statement does say that Google provides data to the company after its legal team reviews the request, and the Google Transparency report shows that Google does provide at least some data for 70% of requests. If we assume the legal staff reviews requests, pushing back on overly broad or otherwise inappropriate requests, then directs the collection of the data and sends it to the FBI, that process would match what's described, with the key addition of a human review process.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, though I don't know anything about any of this stuff. I do, however, have pretty good reason to believe that Google is being truthful, mostly because Google's statements fit the company's culture and approach, and the theories about direct access or backdoors do not, and because I think this kind of program would be very hard to hide from Googlers... and I think the aforementioned culture would make it impossible to suppress if it were discovered.)

The leaks seem to be coming out in a clever order, starting with the most credible. An obvious benefit of this is that each lends credence to the next. Perhaps less obviously, each time the government passes up an opportunity to come clean, it makes the lies more obvious. We might have already known (or guessed) all this stuff, but now we have government officials on record lying about the extent of surveillance, over and over, just before backtracking to defend it.

The leaks seem to be coming out in a clever order, starting with the most credible.

Depends on your definition of "credible" - the idea that the NSA spies on non-citizens was not a secret, the particular methods and specific targets were official secrets, but it was basically the official reason for the existence of the organization.

That the NSA spies on citizens is a whole different concept, one that has been officially denied anytime there was an undocumented leak and had to be internally justified by essentially redefining words like changing "collect" to no longer mean "gather up" but instead to access from a database full of information that had already been gathered up.

now we have government officials on record lying about the extent of surveillance, over and over, just before backtracking to defend it.

Other than Clapper who outright lied to Congress before any of the Snowden Files were made public, what are you talking about? Did somebody say "we don't spy on the UN" in the last week or two?

Yes the term limited hangout psy-op is been used.
The public outing of 1980's diplomatic communications between Tripoli and the Libyan embassy in East Berlin should have been a warning to the EU.
The IRA ands its connections to unique supplies from the US east coast should have been a warning to the UK/EU.
The strange messages leaked via Iranian communications in 1991 should have have been a warning to the EU.
The low cost and total trust the EU and NATO put in 1970/80's US crypto compatibility is only now

The IRA ands its connections to unique supplies from the US east coast should have been a warning to the UK/EU

Which reminds me that one of the Senators calling for Snowdon's blood used to finance the IRA. Puts it in perspective doesn't it? A leak versus giving money to terrorists, who bought their explosives from Libya. Explosives manufactured in Eastern Europe in the depths of the cold war. I know which one looks a lot more like treason to me.

Is anyone honestly going to claim no one else is spying? Who thinks the EU doesn't spy on the US? etc?

Everyone is spying on everyone else. Its part of diplomacy.

Why? countries lie. Countries manipulate. And no one really trusts anyone in the end. So you spy.

Every nation spies on every other nation to the extent that they care and have the resources. This is why the US catches Russian sleeper agents occasionally... or busts Chinese spies. This happens all the time. And the general convention on the matter is that if we don't punish their spying we won't punish their spying.

How many spies has the US executed recently? None. And we could by international law. Same thing with the spies they catch. They aren't killed. They're exchanged.

Just for measure, as you may not understand the EU institutions.The European Council is composed of the governments of the states of the EU. It usually works by organizing reunions of ministers for each political domain, as well as reunions of the heads of government, and that's currently the place where important decisions are taken. Given that there are 27 members, it is a piece of cake for the US to know what is said in there, and some countries' governments will gladly tell the US if they ask. Except that they may distort the message to fit their interests. Thus, it is interesting for US spys to get the information directly. But on the political level, this spying is tantamount to bugging the White House's main conference room.

his is why the US catches Russian sleeper agents occasionally... or busts Chinese spies. This happens all the time. And the general convention on the matter is that if we don't punish their spying we won't punish their spying.

Being in company of China and Russia with your track record isn't something I'd consider to be proud about.

(EU doesn't have a NSA equivalent no matter how much you fantasize about james bond, no central CIA either, because many countries don't want to deal with the political and moral problems of assassinating people, because that's not how we roll and you better hope we never start to roll that way)

In all honestly I think we can defend ourselves perfectly well without spying on Britain and hacking their computers.

It's not about morals, it's that at some point, the threat from having a dark, hidden organization inside the government, operating away from the light of disclosure, becomes greater than the threat of foreign countries invading. It's been a long time since Britain attacked us.

It's interesting how the "revelations" from "former" CIA employee and short-term NSA external contractor are so ground-breaking and not just what people who don't own a TV have known for years. Bread and circus, knew the Roman Empire, keep people from revolt. Snowden is a circus. Putin said it best when he pointed out that FSB had no interest in Snowden, it would be like trying to skin a pig: Lots of screams but no wool.

Yeah, I know this is too true information even for slashdot, I'm guessing this will be modded down.

The major success of the Cold War was the avoidance of a nuclear war. This came about in large part because both sides had good information on the other's forces & equipment. Not just because we signed treaties but because we were checking on each other.

The key phrase was: Trust, but verify. Even with allies, trust but verify avoids surprises.

The genius of Reagan "the madman" wasn't in its effects in the U.S.S.R, but instead its effects on the allies of the U.S.S.R and the U.S's quasi-friends such as France.

When bombing Libya and killing the leaders family in 1986, we also "accidentally" bombed the French embassy when our laser guided bombs went "off target." It was completely a coincidence that France refused to let us use their airspace for the bombing mission, adding thousands of kilometers to the trip. Completely a coincidence I tell ya!

European online editions of newspapers have it all over their title pages. Scores of EU politicians and servants indignated. I suddenly wonder if, ironically, this could be one of the many little pushes the EU needs to attain more internal unity. Sad it should be brought along by the discovery of a new intimate foe... But then again, the sun has been going down over the US for some time already now.

"The EU never was a Union. It has always been a trade treaty and some fools tried to make more out of it."

The intent of the EU / EC / ECSC was always to form a political union. Granted it is not there yet, but the founding fathers where quite clear on this, and any state joining signs up for this long term goal.

I can guarantee you that a lot of citizens who are involved with anything dealing with more than two EU members are quite happy with the Union influencing the local legislation.

look man - I DO WANT the EU to have affect on my local legislation. do you know why? I don't think that protectionist tolls on products and produce are good for me. I don't want alcohol tax to be so fucking high. I want to be able to buy already taxed used cars from germany without having to pay taxes again on it. I do want to be able to go to work in other EU countries without fuss. I do want to be able to buy whatever I want from germany and uk if I want. I do want that someone else than a local politician decides if we should devalue my bank account(because gee whiz the local politicians fucked things up way more than eu did).

The US needs enemies - without them, they can't justify the country's wartime government budget that has lasted since approximately 1940. If the US doesn't have any enemies, it goes out of its way to create some.

Of course, "terrorist sleeper cells" are the best enemy anyone's ever thought of because (a) they could be anywhere, (b) it's impossible to say you've destroyed all of them, (c) everything you're going to do to stop them is required to be secret, (d) they could attack anywhere in the US at any time creating a wonderful fear factor, and (e) the government is supposed to catch them before they've actually done anything criminal.

States or "state-likes" like the EU spy on each other, ok.
I find it much more worrying that normal EU citizens are being spied on by UK services [guardian.co.uk]. My government (German) tells me they didn't know about it, and of course I am inclined to believe they are not telling me the truth (new default reaction to free world government officials saying something). The reaction our minister of justice got when she dared to demand some clarification from the Brits, a polite "go f**k yourself", is still interesting. Oh, and literally while I write this comment, this just in: (article in german) the NSA also massivcely spies on the german public. [spiegel.de]

More than half of the discussion I hear recently is about how awful it is that the US is spying on other countries. I'm baffled by this. Of course we spy on other countries. And they spy on us. And each other. That's what the CIA/NSA/KGB/etc are for. That's their role, am I incorrect?

The issue isn't "ermagherd, we're spyin' on other countries!". It's "holy fuck, our own government is spying on its own citizens, even though they are expressly forbidden from doing so".

It's more than that, the issue is a state apparatus completely gone out of control and we are just seeing signs of it. Contrary to all the faux-sophisticates in this thread, spying isnt a matter of everyone does it and anything goes. Of course intelligence agencies *gather data* but bugging diplomats is quite illegal in most circumstances, both under international and domestic law. It also tends to piss people off. Spying on a nation you are at war with is expected, yes. Spying on your own allies is just a

Don't rule out the Grand-Duchy of Transylvania, either. Duke Vlad the Impaler has no citizens left to do any spying for him. Although wait - his castle is full of bats. Now what with their echolocation capabilities when they fly over neighbouring Romania....

but they're moving the definition so that as long as the operators are inside usa they're free to hack globally. of course this is a legal pothole since when it's the other way around they argue that it is indeed the other way around and the hackers are committing crimes on american soil to be tried with american laws..